I'm going to change this into a harder question: There's a drug that causes anterograde amnesia that keeps you from forming long-term memories while you're on it A guy who wants to commit a violent crime deliberately takes the drug so he won't live with the guilt of doing ithttps://twitter.com/GailSimone/status/1315510372275613697 …
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You find out that this drug forms a pathological addiction cycle with many people with disordered, impulsive behavior -- the natural system of "regret" we have that keeps us from acting in hot blood on violent urges can be short-circuited with this drug
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And, because people have *seen* your answers to Gail's question and know that you have a tendency to say "If he doesn't remember doing it then it's like he's a different person", deliberately take the drug for this reason, as a moral defense
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Because when you're fucked up and you're really mad at someone all you care about is that they get the shit beat out of them, not the satisfaction of remembering that you did the beating The drug giving you a mind-wipe and letting you expiate your guilt is all upside
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People deliberately start whole communities, subcultures around taking a Jekyll and Hyde potion so Mr. Hyde can come out and do the things you really want to do and Dr. Jekyll can argue with a straight face he's not responsible for any of it
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(Psst drugs like this really exist, with varying degrees of effectiveness, and are used for this purpose all the time It may not be the *best* such drug but the oldest and cheapest one is called alcohol The culture around getting drunk to hurt people is thousands of years old)
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It's a big question, isn't it There's the whole thing about reading a news story from the 1920s about a guy who drove a car through a storefront and killed a bunch of people, but his lawyer got it pled down to a lesser crime Because everyone saw he was extremely drunk
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Replying to @arthur_affect
although if this drug is used for NOTHING but creating this very specific defense, it seems like proving the defendant intentionally took the drug would become the important question
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Replying to @mari_shepard @arthur_affect
Makes it look premeditated to me.
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Replying to @Teknogrot @arthur_affect
For that matter, I imagine taking the drug would itself become a serious crime (again, if it was literally, only ever used for the purpose of...crime)
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The thing is that alcohol obviously isn't a perfect MIB neuralyzer mindwipe (no such thing exists, and is probably impossible) But it definitely works *well enough* for this purpose And it probably works well enough *because* consciousness is a continuum, not discrete
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I.e. most of us acknowledge there's a difference between getting a little buzzed vs. actually "blackout drunk" And there's a difference between a *genuine* blackout, and the "Oh, I can barely remember last night, that was CRAZY" state people actively seek out
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If there were a drug that actually worked like a perfect mindwipe we'd probably immediately ban it If it has an "in-between" effect, it becomes much less clear -- and a lot of us find that "in-between" dampening of cognitive function desirable ("drinking to forget" etc)
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